Percy's Worst Mistake
by BlueSphinx
Summary: The third Weasley brother is going to Hogwarts this coming autumn... but he wants to learn how to make people like him. And so he takes on a summer course - Ten Steps of Pranking.
1. 1st Step of Pranking

1st Step of Pranking

"Cookies! Cookies! I made cookies!" Six years old Ginny Weasley bounced up the stairs bellowing on top of her lungs, a plate of oven-hot cookies balancing dangerously in her hands. "Fred, George, I made cookies!"

The twins abandoned the battered book they had been writing corrections into when the red ball of energy burst in through the door of their room.

"Cookies!" she beamed at them, showing off both of her missing teeth.

"Congratulations, Ginny!" Fred exclaimed with mock excitement, jumping up from the floor and clapping his hands together in a way that much mimicked Great Auntie Muriel on her finer days.

"Our little Ginny, all grown up," George added, drying an imaginary tear from the corner of his eye.

Ginny, though, didn't seem to be disturbed by their antics.

"I made them for you!" she added, smiling again with all the innocence of six years. "Here you are," and she placed the plate on George's messy bed, disappearing from view.

As soon as the door closed with a bang behind the lithe form, Fred prodded one of the cookies with a finger.

"They smell rather nice," he admitted.

"Yeah, they do," George agreed with a dreamy voice, and also poked a cookie. "You think they're safe for eating?"

Fred shrugged.

"She's only six," he said, twirling a delicious-looking biscuit. "Besides, they're with chocolate."

"Remember us at six?" George, the wavering voice of reason in the room, reminded his brother. "And chocolate is a wonderful thing to hide potions in, as you should well know."

"You're right." Fred sighed wistfully. They were both staring at the plate of sweets with hurtful expressions, as if the cookies were responsible for what might happen if they ate them.

"We should have someone taste them," George suggested finally, not managing to turn his hungry eyes and watering mouth away from the plate.

Fred nodded, but other than that, didn't move. Suddenly there was a hesitant knock on the door.

The twins turned to look at each other, waken from the stupor.

"Who's there?" Fred asked.

"Percy," came the unexpected answer.

Identical grins spread across the two identical faces.

"Come on in, dear brother," George invited, quickly hiding Percy's old potions book that they had been improving under his pillow.

"How can we help you?" Fred asked as the tall bespectacled form entered the room, carefully shutting the door after him.

"Well," he started, "I was thinking…"

"Yes?" Fred probed with a huge smile.

"Have a seat!" George said, grinning, swiping a pile of books, crumpled parchment, quills, and other assorted items to the floor from the only chair in the room. Percy sat slowly, his eyes moving around nervously all the time, as if he wasn't sure whether he was doing the right thing.

"September is nearing…" Percy said carefully.

"It surely is! Wonderful, isn't it?" Fred chirped.

"There'll be mud everywhere!" George nodded fervently. "Have a cookie!" and he pushed the plate under Percy's nose.

Percy looked at the plate distantly, but then shook his head.

"No, thanks, dinner will be soon and nobody should eat sweets before dinner." He inhaled slowly, then looked up at his twin brothers. "I need your help."

The two faces that had fallen when Percy had refused the cookies, now simultaneously turned to an expression of surprise.

"Our help?" George asked carefully.

"Yes. Well, you see, I'll be going to Hogwarts this autumn…"

"You are?" the twins asked in unison, looking at each other with extreme fake wonder.

"You are!" they decided after a moment, pointing accusingly at Percy. After a moment, though, they were forced to let their fingers drop down, for Percy refused to start shouting at them. He seemed to be really worried about something.

"What do you want, then?" Fred asked finally, scrutinizing his morose older brother.

"I want you to teach me to make people like me!" Percy answered fervently. "I want you to teach me how to make people laugh, how to make them feel good in my company. I want you to teach me how to make everyone think that I'm a fun person to be around." He took a breath. "I want you to teach me how to prank people."

"Have a cookie!" Fred said in a slow voice with something closely resembling awe in it, intoning the sentence as if the words were "Well, finally!"

Percy shook his head again, somehow looking ashamed at having asked for help from his younger brothers and for something like that.

George instantly took the line over from his twin.

"You really do deserve a cookie! You've successfully completed lesson number one! Can you tell us what it was?"

At this question, a bit of eagerness returned to Percy's features, and Fred gave George a thumbs-up.

"I think," Percy started, analyzing it like he always analyzed everything, "that, logically thinking, the first lesson in pranking should be acknowledging one's own incompetence in the field and then getting in contact with someone with more expertise, and then asking them to be their teacher?"

"And you have indeed found the true masters of the art!" Fred beamed. "Don't you think you deserve a cookie?"

Percy shrugged and finally took one, taking a large bite of it and slowly chewing it through.

The twins considered him carefully, trying to see if any part of him changed colour or developed a rash or something. Nothing seemed to happen.

Percy finished the cookie, licked his fingers, and gave his younger brothers first smile over many years.

"Thanks, that was delicious!"

Fred and George smiled brightly back at him, then at each other, and dug for the plate of cookies. After a few moments of struggle they resurfaced from George's bed, both having a couple of biscuits in their mouths and a few more in their hands; the plate was left quite empty.

Percy chuckled slightly as he watched his brothers devouring their sweets, and even more as he heard their mother's voice bellowing through the house, calling everyone to dinner. He left the room proudly, not waiting for his new teachers, happy for having completed the first step of pranking so easily, and happy that his gluttonous brothers had ruined their appetites, and he had not.


	2. 2nd Step of Pranking

2nd Step of Pranking

Dinner at the Burrow was always a loud affair. Percy seemed to be the only person who cared enough to at least try to use some civilised table manners. He had just finished taking a generous helping of cauliflower onto his plate when the twins came running down the stairs like a pair of mad manticores, skidding to a halt in front of the table just a millisecond too late, making the whole table shake and almost all bowls spill some of their contents. Percy was happy he had still been holding his dinner in his hands.

The elders, of course, noticed none of this, for Arthur was busy with Ginny who had decided that this day she would eat only food which was orange in colour and was now demanding pumpkins, Mother was still at the oven, and Bill was leaning back in his chair, surveying the scene with an amused look, his fork stuck between his teeth, which naturally didn't disturb his incessant whistling. Charlie and Ron still hadn't shown up.

"Ah, there they come," Molly said with barely a glance towards the back door, and true to her word, the two brothers still missing entered the kitchen, Ron bouncing around with elation at something (probably the fact that it was dinner, Percy thought), covered in dust and mud and splatters of something, and Charlie behind him with his usual natural grace and good humour.

"Charlie threw apples at me!" Ron declared loudly as soon he had fully entered the chaos that the kitchen was.

"He what?" Molly and Arthur asked simultaneously, creating an instant silence in the room, through which Bill's otherwise quiet snort was clearly audible, even more so after his fork fell out of his mouth and hit the floor with a clatter.

"Charlie threw apples at me," Ron repeated, still beaming, and Percy quickly started stuffing his cauliflowers into his mouth to get enough to eat before the inevitable explosion.

"Go Charlie!" the twins whooped, but at one glance from their mother shut up and turned all their attention to eating.

"Not like that," Charlie quickly tried to explain, "I wasn't trying to hurt him or anything."

"We played Quidditch!" Ron supplied, nodding fervently and smiling from ear to ear.

"You were flying?" Molly asked in a dangerously low voice.

"No, of course not!" Charlie replied, just as Ron said, "No, he wouldn't let me," his smile washing down from his face as if it had never been there.

"Thank Merlin for that," Molly said with a sigh of relief, and the blush that had almost been appearing on Charlie's face, receded. Bill, the twins and Ginny were all chuckling at the table, Arthur looking as if he would have liked to join his children in that. Molly continued, "But why on earth did you do it?"

"He wants to become a Keeper. I thought I'd help him train or something…"

"Ah, all right. Go clean yourselves up and be back in three minutes," Molly ordered with a resigned sigh, and Ron took off running towards the door, all smiles again.

"Fred and George threw apples at me yesterday!" he told mother when passing her, "but they hurt more."

And the door shut with a bang behind him.

This time, the silence in the kitchen was complete.

-----

A knock on Percy's door disturbed him from his reading.

Without invitation, Fred and George entered the room. They were similarly green in the face, and without further introduction, plopped down on Percy's bed.

"Your nose is greenish," George said suddenly, after having studied Percy's features for a few moments.

"Erm… Yours… erm… too," Percy replied unsurely.

"We know. Mum even let us off our punishment for that. She thought it was punishment enough." Fred seemed angry at something or someone.

"Why are you green in the face?" Percy asked, after a few moments of silence had ensured him that the twins were not going to elaborate on the theme without incentive.

"Ginny's cookies," Fred said.

"She used Ron's chocolate that he had been keeping for the _dark times_ or something," George added as if that should explain everything.

It probably did, and Percy was just about to start categorising the facts in his mind to find out what had happened to his twin brothers' faces (and his nose, if they were to believe), when Fred decided to make their business known.

"Now, step number two in pranking," he said, sitting up straighter.

Percy instantaneously forgot all about the colour green and perked up to listen.

"What do you think step number two is?" Fred asked him.

"Maybe… pranking?" Percy chanced.

"No," Fred replied.

"Not yet," Geroge added.

"Step number two is choosing the victim," Fred explained.

Percy nodded, and took some notes on the piece of parchment on his desk.

"So, choose the victim!" George said almost impatiently, though with his skin green the lines on his face were not easy to read.

Percy racked his brain quickly and tried to come up with who it would be most suitable to prank. As he spent almost all of his time in the Burrow, it definitely had to be someone from the family.

"Dad?" he asked.

"No," was the simultaneous answer.

"Mum then?" he was actually a bit frightened of this idea.

"No, definitely not," George said, shuddering, and Fred seemed to turn a bit more green in his face.

"Bill? Charlie?"

"Someone who's younger than you!" Fred snapped, obviously displeased with Percy's progress.

"Ginny?"

"No one pranks Ginny," George said solemnly.

"No one _ever_ pranks Ginny," Fred added a moment later.

"And that leaves either us or _Ron_," George said, almost hissing the name of his brother, and Percy again found himself wondering what Ron had done to get the twins so worked up.

"And you can't prank your teachers," Fred said, cutting through his thoughts, and Percy was almost sure he heard the muttered "at least as long as they are better than you" following it.

"Ron…" Percy nodded slowly. "He seems to be the obvious choice."

"Of course," George said, "He _deserves_ it, that's why!"

"Lesson number three tomorrow!" Fred said, still seemingly a bit angry, and in a moment the twins were out of Percy's room.

Before the door closed after their back, Percy heard one of the twins complaining to the other.

"I just don't understand why children won't eat their chocolate when it's just sitting there waiting to be eaten!"


End file.
